Time Lags And Differential Pace: Bullet Time, William Faulkner and Jessica Hagedorn

This chapter begins with the way Wesely’s record-breaking pinhole photographs from Open Shutter (2004) use the effect of blur to connect relative rates of movement to larger histories as such. Similarly, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) is focused on racialised time lag not simply between two points on a single historical line, but between different histories that move at different rates and go their own ways. Here, the temporal aspect of double consciousness – of always living in someone else’s time and yet also located in a distinctive history marked by laggy access – connects with postcolonial treatments of time lag and the way in which historical behindness opens onto the tangle of histories that appears synecdochically in the plane of the present as heterogeneity. Finally, Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle (2003) stages the collision, overlap and differences between the story of Magellan’s ‘discovery’ of the Philippines, the 1970s hoax of the uncontacted ‘Stone Age’ Tasaday people, the filming of contemporary US history in Apocalypse Now in Mindanao, and the long-running Moro insurgency. Each of these texts contains a bullet-time scene in which the dilation of the encounter of disjunctive rhythms reveals a heterochronic assemblage of time-paths and historical frames.